How can we rethink the ancient Near East beyond the categories and assumptions that have often shaped its history?

We are delighted to announce that Maurice Sartre, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Tours, will deliver the opening keynote of the international conference New Perspectives on the Roman Near East (October 27–29).

One of the foremost historians of eastern Mediterranean antiquity, Maurice Sartre has played a leading role in advancing historical understanding of the societies of Syria, Arabia, and the wider region in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Among his best-known works are Trois études sur l'Arabie romaine et byzantine (1982), L'Orient romain: provinces et sociétés provinciales du Proche-Orient d'Auguste aux Sévères (1991), and The Middle East Under Rome (2005). The scholarship of Sartre has been instrumental in situating the region within the broader political, cultural, and economic setting of the ancient Mediterranean, contributing to a more nuanced and connected understanding of the ancient Near East.

In his keynote lecture, Sartre invites us to reconsider how we write the history of the Near East, questioning assumptions that have often presented the region as culturally uniform or fundamentally different from the broader Hellenistic and Roman context. Instead, he reveals a landscape of extraordinary diversity in which Hellenistic traditions, Roman institutions, and deeply rooted regional cultures intersected and evolved. The lecture offers both a historical argument and a methodological reflection: how can we move beyond inherited categories and write the history of the ancient Near East from the ground up? Above all, Sartre argues for a history grounded in the region itself, attentive to its landscapes and material remains, as well as the wider Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds of which its communities and inhabitants were part.